Skift Take
In light of Airbnb buying HotelTonight, Skift looks back at the many copycats of the mobile-first hotel booking agency. Where are they now?
After Airbnb bought HotelTonight, our thoughts turned to the many clones of the startup.
When CEO Sam Shank and chief technology officer Jared Simon co-founded HotelTonight in 2010, they had to popularize the new concept of mobile-only, last-minute, curated hotel bookings.
However, before long, roughly a dozen other companies with strikingly similar business models popped up around the world.
HotelTonight defended itself by out-raising the copycats. It collected about $117 million from investors. It also sourced its inventory directly from hoteliers, and general managers could easily see how it was driving lower-cost, high-value bookings. Some copycats became resellers instead.
Earlier this month, Airbnb said it would acquire hotel booking platform HotelTonight for a little more than $400 million, with about half in stock.
"The acquisition by Airbnb certainly represents the end of an era for stand-alone, last-minute, mobile-only hotel booking," said Joe Haslam, chairman and a co-founder of HotHotels, a Spanish company that once took eleventh-hour consumer bookings and now operates as a back office hotel booking platform for mobile.
"Sam and Jared deserve much credit for creating the category, and it's fitting the era ends with them," Haslam said.
Perhaps the scariest copycat came from Booking.com, which in 2015 launched a Booking Now app separate from its main app. Booking Now prompted shoppers to reserve lodging up to 48 hours in advance. The app would "probably kill HotelTonight," predicted Wired magazine. Yet the online travel agency abandoned the separate app after less than two years.
HotelTonight faced a tension between maintaining profitability and competing against Booking.com, Expedia, and other better-capitalized players in online customer acquisition.
"I think the HotelTonight business model didn't work in Europe the way it did in the U.S.," said Stefan Menden, founder and CEO of JustBook. "I'm aware of at least five serious European companies that followed the HotelTonight idea, including three financed startups and two corporate apps. All of them are gone, and to my knowledge HotelTonight never did any serious business in Europe itself, despite hiring loca
